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We've got the schedule. I'm not allowed to publish it, but the premiere films we'll be seeing come within rough order of their public screening debut days. There will also be, as anticipated, a significant number of sidebar items from the Convergence, Shorts, Revivals, and Documentary series made available at exclusive press and industry screenings. Here are the films I'll all be able to see if I have the stamina, because they are scheduled for viewer availability. As usual I'll cut some corners to meet my priority of writing actual reviews of all the Main Slate films. The latter are printed in bold type below, the non-bold therefore being extras from the other series.

A promotional release tells us this film is now Taiwan's official Best Foreign Oscar entry for 2016. And also:

**WINNER - BEST DIRECTOR - Cannes Film Festival, 2015**
Official Selection - Toronto International Film Festival, 2015
Official Selection - New York Film Festival, 2015
Official Selection - Fantastic Fest, 2015

D'Angelo said at Cannes as usual he'd rather just have looked at a folder of stills of the beautiful image, and he gave it only a 54, but it seems to have moved up somewhat in his rankings for the top films of the year. It's screening at Toronto today (10 Sept), Sunday and Tuesday (13 and 15 Sept. 2015).

A widow of three years is visited by the ghost of her husband and goes on a trip with him. The romance and spiritual and spooky aspects get lost unfortunately in the jumbled, impossible-to-follow-or-care-about plot. So Kurosawa's best feature in a while remains his 2008 Tokyo Sonata. Debuted at Cannes.

First real feature from "Joe" since his Golden-Palm-winning UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN SEE HIS PAST LIVES (2010) revisits familiar themes and scenes. The distinctive style is there. He's still "got it." But while there's some magic, there isn't the quantity of magic that has made him the darling of Cannes.

Wow. Well, this is the first panel of a wildly ambitious, or maybe just spirited and noisy, triptych that weighs in at over six hours in all and seeks to constitute an indictment of European austerity policies that have crippled the Portuguese economy and made people miserable, and at the same time a self-reflective, humorous, bawdy, folkloric collection of wildly improvisational tales and documents. It comes on with a lot of confidence, and impresses with its use of 16mm widescreen and music from Rimsky Korsakoff to Arvo Pärt (loud). But it did not win me over, and in fact it seemed repetitious and boring in parts. So let's see how Volumes 2 and 3 go. Not so well, judging by Volume 2, which I've already seen. But he sure has a lot going on. This debuted at the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs, AKA Directors Fortnight, at Cannes this year. And obviously some were impressed. It has opened theatrically in France and gotten excellent reviews. Though some grant it doesn't all hold together, despite the unifying device of claiming its many parts are tales told by Scherezade, like in the Arabic story collection.

This two-hours-plus segment cuts way back on the preaching anti-austerity and shifts into meandering narrative gear with a strange story about a bad country man who gets rounded up by the police; a lengthy shaggy-dog-style open air courtroom sequence with a female judge who despairs at the assembled townsmen's interconnected malfeasances and stupidities; and another series of interconnected anecdotes concerning the generally downbeat inhabitants of a big block of flats. I compare the mock trial with Sissako's Bamako and the apartment dweller tales to Kieslowski's Decalogue and find Gomes' efforts at storytelling and moralizing, relatively speaking, sadly inadequate. And his music and and sound effects are so damn loud. Either there is a technical glitch or he seems to be trying to impress by sheer noise level.

Whether or not Brian De Palma is your favorite director, this is an admirably straightforward document. In one long fluent and articulate interview De Palma clearly and unpretentiously describes his career film by film with the outlines of his bio (education, professional friendships, marriages) when hey are relevant, and the filmmakers edit in illustrative clips to help show how his style and technique play out in the individual works. This is the kind of film you could have on DVD and study in small segments. It's packed with information. Not inappropriately, this doc debuted at Venice, where De Palma has often been better received than Stateside. His little-seen anti-Iraq War screed Redacted (NYFF 2007) won a Silver Lion at Venice.

Interesting French scriptwriter for Audiard (A Prophet, Rust and Bone) and Bonello (Saint Laurent) gets a somewhat uneasy start in the plot-intensive and character-underdeveloped drama about an ersatz hobby cowboy whose daughter runs off with an Arab jihadist prior to 9/11. An indirect homage to John Ford's The Searchers. Script credited to script by Noé Debré, who collaborated on Audiard's new Cannes winner Dheepan.

Lead of a FSLC press release I'm passing on that arrived yesterday (Mon. 21 Sept. 2015). I missed the Animation and New York Shorts programs and a revival of Lino Broca's Insiang (1976) yesterday, which (the Broca) was part of NYFF 2006 and I reviewed it then.

New York, NY (September 21, 2015) – The Film Society of Lincoln Center announces Ana Vaz as the 2015 Kazuko Trust Award Recipient. The grant is presented by the Kazuko Trust and the Film Society, in recognition of the excellence and innovation of an artist’s moving-image work. Vaz’s latest short film, Occidente, will premiere on Friday, October 2 and Saturday, October 3 in Program 3 of this year’s Projections section, running October 2-4 and sponsored by MUBI. Visit filmlinc.org/nyff for more information

This post-neorealist Italian melodramatic epic, in a 4K restoration out of Bologina again, (with some footage added back) deserves re-viewing and a careful reassessment. It's still powerful, but there are various weaknesses that show up now.

This admiring documentary from Sweden emphasizes the great star's liberated personality and charm and includes a lot of home movies and warmly forgiving testimony by hour four children, who took second place, but found her so charming they could not condemn her. Nothing brilliant here in the filmmaking department, but of interest because -- Ingrid.

A restoration by Twentieth Century Fox shows the eye-popping blues and reds of the studio's "candy box" Technicolor and a classic studio film from a play featuring Gene Tierney and an impressive Don Ameche, the latter an aging, now dead, roué who tells his life story to Satan at the elegant gate of Hades to see if he qualifies. He turns out tob have been a better guy than he realized, despite a bit of womanizing. No connection to the 1978 Warren Beatty/Buck Henry movie; no traipsing back and forth between earth and the beyond in this one. It's more a sequence of scenes that dramatize a romanticized rich class of naive Midwestern beef moguls and Fifth Avenue millionaires for whom work was a choice, not a necessity. I'm not so keen on this kind of fantasy -- there's not enough of an edge in this rote Hollywood version of it -- but I can appreciate the polished studio work and the beautifully artificial Technicolor.

This turned out to be the first Main Slate film that clicked for me and I think one of Gondry's best and most personal films. It concerns a couple of young teenage misfits who go on a summer road trip riding a DIY car they've built powered by an outboard motor. They have a few adventures, going from their hometown of Versailles to Le Morvan. This means of travel lets Gondry indulge his passion for oddball gadgetry but surreal or fantastic or sheer quirk never take over and the emphasis is on the two boy's conversations with each other and their confrontations both crabwise and direct with such issues of their age as masturbation, virginity, masculinity, courage, and escaping from parental influence and peer conformity. The opposite extreme from the off-putting extravaganza that was his recent Boris Vian adaptation, Mood Indigo/L'Écune des jours, which was an expensive flop, and like Gondry's realistic, simpler films, the family portraitThe Thorn in the Heart and the Brooklyn bus ride, The We and the Eye.

Forgot to mention this. It's all part of the promotional buildup, since this is a wide release coming out very soon, so what's so important about the public getting a "sneak preview"? but it has been getting good (not great) reviews (Metacritic 76%). General press are not offered comps.

THE FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER ANNOUNCED TODAY A SNEAK PREVIEW OF THE MARTIAN ON SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 27 AT THE 53RD NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL
New York, NY (September 22, 2015) – The Film Society of Lincoln Center announced today via Twitter a Sneak Preview of The Martian, presented in RealD 3D, at the 53rd New York Film Festival on Sunday, September 27 at Alice Tully Hall. Tickets are on sale now, visit filmlinc.org/nyff2015.